We left San Francisco for the interesting town of Sacramento which was a stop off for our journey to Yosemite and also a place where I had seen a man vs food challenge I wanted to attempt. The task was 5 hot dogs , half a kilo of chilli and a kilo of fries. Unfortunately my planning hadn't been great and the cafe was shut when we arrived. Instead we just had the standard American meal of a huge burger and loads of fries..

The next day we drove to the town of Mariposa where we would be starting our Yosemite trip from the next day. This was an extremely small place where we took a tour of the local museum (Rich was very bored), did some laundry and found a cafe serving chilli dogs. That evening, as it was my birthday, we went for a fancy meal in the only restaurant. The place wa empty apart from one local joe and the waitress was very happy to see some new people. She actually turned out to be a bit crazy and wouldn't leave us alone the whole night. We did get a birthday cheesecake in the end though so all was good. We left, but not before getting a few snaps with the local bear that had been caught recently.

The next day we drove to Yosemite park. We hadn't prepared properly for how cold it was so the first hike lasted less than 5 mins. The sights in Yosemite were amazing, as snow covered large portions of the park. We all agreed it was definitely an unexpected highlight of the trip. We kept hearing a lot of stories about bears in the park and how not to leave any food or rubbish in your car. We looked at each other and thought of the big bag of food from Facebook on the back seat. On one of our hikes the path had frozen over so much everyone was slipping. One woman had decided ugg boots were the most appropriate footwear and got some real air time on one fall. That night we stayed in a lodge just outside the park. We had nothing on site apart from a monopoly board so we rolled back the years and got down to some serious gaming. Luckily my old monopoly skills and tactics came flooding back to me and I wiped the floor with the Pilkingtons.

The next day we drove a different way through the park to see the 'world's tallest trees' before heading onto Bakersfield which was our overnight stop before Death Valley. The highlight of this stop has to be when we settled down for some practice at Texas hold'em, playing 4 hands before anyone noticed that we had managed to buy a pack of cards with only picture cards. Death Valley was found down many long and lonely highways, we could easily go for half an hour without seeing another soul. We stopped off for some lunch at a place called Shoshone which was the smallest place in the world (not official) or as Rich liked to describe it, "a one horse town". During one of our long drives we saw some coyotes so we pulled over to take some photos. Rich got half way out his door before we saw the coyote start running at us, we decided to move a bit further down the road and take a picture out of the window. With the window down and me hanging out of it trying to get a good shot they again ran at us. This resulted in a lot of high pitched noises (not Helen unfortunately) and screeching tyres as we bricked it. That night we stayed in a town call Pahrump where the local bar we went to had shuffleboard in which we became a bit addicted to.

On our final stop off before Vegas we went to the Hoover Dam, as some crazy woman had previously told us we had to go and do the tour to the bottom. We got there and were promptly told that no tours would be running that day. We were still able to look around the top of the dam and the visitor centre. We were extremely impressed with the dam, especially the speed it had been built at and the advanced building techniques.